


These hands weren't made for fists.

by DammitToby



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Fight Club AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DammitToby/pseuds/DammitToby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Kirk, Len found out, had a fire in his soul and no greater design than to use that fire to start new fires. He lived and fucked and fought by the same rules held in a book of matches: Find friction, throw a strike, burn until you hit flesh, and disappear entirely, the host for the night used and tossed away. The only thing Len knew Jim Kirk would return to, besides himself, was his passionate distaste for anything resembling rules.<br/>Spock was cool and calm and not only played by the rules but physically embodied them with his pin straight appearance and looming demeanor.<br/>So, naturally, Jim Kirk wanted to fuck Spock.<br/>And Len? Len just wanted to know when his life stopped making fucking sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These hands weren't made for fists.

When Leonard McCoy (Len to his friends, when he had them) set out on his journey to become the world's best neurosurgeon, the goal was so lofty he never actually considered what the consequences of actually achieving it might be. Sure, he expected demand, and sure, he expected the hours of intense, delicate work often set within weeks of each other. He even, if he felt particularly honest with himself, expected more than a few grateful patients (and perhaps a little prestige in the medical field).

He was not expecting the goddamn airplanes.

So there had been a slight miscalculation in his expectations. When he imagined demand, he figured his patients would fly to see him, not that they'd often be the rich sort of asshole that would fly him in to see them.

Whoops.

Why was this a problem? Well, with a normal, well-adjusted person, it wouldn't be.

Len was not a normal, well-adjusted person. Len had fucking _aviophobia_ of all things.

But hey, he didn't spend a decade of his life earning these rich asshole clients for nothing.

Thank fucking god for Valium.

~

Another thing he never expected: insomnia. He couldn't fucking sleep.

Now this happened for a number of reasons.

First off was med school. He had known from his father med school was hell on your sleep schedule, between interning, clinic shifts, and classes (both sitting in and teaching in Leo's case) you barely had time to breath much less sleep. Knowing beforehand and experiencing were two entirely different things.

Second happened to be known as a post-op high. Kind of a misnomer considering he had none of the pleasant effects of a high. What happens is, well, neurosurgery is no cake walk. It takes a certain intensity of focus to manipulate nanometer blades on a tiny robotic "scalpel" inserted into the skull through a hole the size and diameter of a pencil eraser. This focus is damn near impossible to achieve and actually impossible to come down from. For every hour he spent fixing the delicate meshwork of nerves suspended in fatty tissue known as the human brain, Len spent another two keyed up and fidgeting over minutiae such as the uneven pattern of dapples in the fake-marble tiled floor.

Third? He didn't fucking know. He wished he did. In the weeks long breaks he often got between difficult cases, when his next flight was months away and all he had to look forward to were a few clinic shifts? You'd think he'd sleep like a baby.

His brain had other ideas.

Sometimes Len wondered if he were the one who needed surgery. He'd dream (or daydream considering dreaming would require restorative REM sleep like he hasn't known since teenagerhood) about drilling a hole in his own skull, inserting his special little scalpel, finding the little bundle of nerves that switched on his consciousness, and switching them permanently to off.

This, he figures, is the closest he's ever gotten to wishing he were dead.

~

He meets Jim Kirk first.

He knew this day was going to shit when he woke up in his Riverside hotel with an hour to check in to his terminal forty-nine minutes away. He thinks the worst of it culminates when he takes his seat and pats his pockets for his Valium and finds it exactly where he left it. On his hotel bedside table.

Well, at least he left an interesting tip for the maid.

"I may throw up on you," he warns his neighbor. It's only fair.

A pair of alarmingly blue eyes flash onto him, full of questions that are answered when the plane jerks away from the gate, causing Leo to turn green. "You know," he drawls, "these things are generally pretty safe."

"Don't pander to me, kid. It only takes one flaw in the wing design to shear it off entirely and send us in a dive roll to hell. One crack in the plastic tube we're in and the cabin depressurizes in two minutes. Do you have any idea what going from sea level to 30,000 feet does to the blood vessels in your head? Let's see if you're still sitting pretty when you're bleeding from your eyeballs."

This doesn't even faze the kid. "Well, hate to break it to you, but flying is kind of what planes do."

"I know." He grips the seat dividers tight enough to feel where the blue guard cuts to the main arm made of the exact same plastic except in creamed corn yellow. "It's an occupation hazard."

"Flying or neurosis?"

Which actually makes Len smile. "Both."

"Ah. How's that working out for you?"

Len breaks his focus from trying to burn a hole in the faux blue leather of the head rest in from of him to look at his neighbor for the first time. How indeed?

"Well enough." He answers in the tone of someone who's been given a life many others can only dream of and has to act it.

"I can tell." The fucker sounds like he's laughing. Len can't actually be mad, though. The kid's got balls.

Now that Len's actually looking, well, _damn_. He was one of the kids born to be ballsy. The type that's born with the devil-may care smile and sparkling blue eyes that say _of course I'm trouble_. The kind that grow from adorable mess maker to the type of good-looking that transcends "handsome" or even "pretty" to downright "gorgeous", and made you understand why Lucifer was the brightest and most beautiful of the angels before he fell.

And the kind that was totally giving Len with the biggest _I see you checking me out_ grin. Len scowls.

"See? That wasn't so bad." Gorgeous says.

"Wha-?" Len starts, realizing halfway through he's completely forgotten they were flying and were now in the air. "Oh."

He gapes at the kid for another few seconds, before offering a hand.

"McCoy. Leonard McCoy."

"Jim Kirk."

If only Len knew this was only the beginning of his descent into madness.

~

Spock.

Spock was the kind of name a father gave his son when he wanted to ensure a lifetime of nicknames based on unfortunate rhyming words. It was the kind of name that left your mouth tasting like a filthy utterance in the night. It was perhaps the most ridiculous name Len had to say daily.

"Doctor," Spock says in his usual, flat tone that Len likes to think warms an iota just for him. "You're fifteen minutes late to your first examination."

Spock likes to lay all his syllables out in a straight line with a perfectly measured blank space in between where one word ends an the other begins. If they were word processors, Len would be one of those old type writers that snapped out words on a page like the crack of a whip and sometimes ran out of ink before the end of a word, sometimes the beginning, and for the most part forgot punctuation entirely. Spock would be something sleek and digital, with precise formulas tying words in complete, neat bundles and delivering them linearly until he arrived to the final period.

"I don't care," Len snapped.

Spock tilts his head slightly, a gesture Len once thought was one of confusion but now knew meant he detected bullshit was letting it fly past him. "Yes. You do."

And dammit, he did.


End file.
